Commentary on popular culture and society, from a (mostly) psychological perspective

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Medtees in the News and Study on Men and Guns

ABC Chicago has a story and video about Dr. Wes Fisher, an electrophysiologist and blogger, and his wife, Diane, a clinical psychologist, who run Medtees.com. Dr. Fisher was the star of our Cardiology podcast which is one of our most popular. The Fishers' site displays and sells various t-shirts that help patients feel better about their illnesses and can bring some laughter to a bad situation. I know they helped me.

Handling a gun stirs a hormonal reaction in men that primes them for aggression, new research suggests.

Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., enrolled 30 male students in what they described as a taste study. The researchers took saliva samples from the students and measured testosterone levels.

....The "taste sensitivity" phase of the experiment was in fact intended to measure aggressive impulses. After the writing assignment, the young men were asked to rate the taste of a drink, a cup of water with a drop of hot sauce in it. They were then told to prepare a drink for the next person in the experiment, adding as much hot sauce as they liked.

And this aggression is bad how? If you handle a gun to ward off an intruder, isn't the willingness to be aggressive necessary? The researchers found that those men who handled a gun later added more hot sauce in a drink for the next person who was going to do the experiment. After they found out the aim of the experiment, the subjects were found to be disappointed when the next student was not going to drink this wicked brew. Frankly, I would be disappointed that I was not serving it up to the anti-gun lobbyists who cooked up this little trigger-happy experiment.

Aggression bad, victimhood good. I am so sick and tired of this sort of thing. Thank God Almighty for aggression. Aggression saved the Jews who were left alive after Hitler tried to exterminate them. Aggression stops bullys at school every day. Aggression helps people, men AND women, press forward in spite of discrimination, illness, and countless obstacles.

What gave Dr. King the moxie to face the dogs and firehoses?Aggression. What spurred Nancy Kerrigan to come back after the trailer trash had busted up her knee? Aggression. What puts the Hot in the Hotentot? Aggression! (Sorry, I got a little carried away.)

Bottom line, aggression, like compulsiveness, is a good servant but a poor master. Of course we have all been harmed by poorly channeled aggression, but we have also all benefited from it enormously. Part of the anti-aggression stance is just thinly disguised misandry.

Pure nonsense. I would think most people's testosterone would go up just because they realize (or should realize) that they are working with a dangerous piece of equipment they have to be careful with.

Weightlifting raises testosterone levels, when is the ban going to take effect? From what I remember so does red meat, when is that ban coming?

And some of these people need to actually learn about how complex testosterone and other hormones really are - low testosterone levels can actually make people MORE irritable, emotional, cause mood swings, etc.

I don't know whether it has anything to do with testosterone levels or not, but when we run people through pre-deployment checks (SRP), I have to see if any of the women are mothers of newborns, and also ask everyone if they have become conscientious objectors since the last time they were asked. The women who happen to have newborns always without fail give me the Victrola dog look when I ask if they would have moral qualms at killing someone - they would use a meat-ax on anyone who came near their baby.

That's the naturally more nurturant nature of women and motherhood versus the violent and macho male nature.

It's obvious these theorists have spent their whole lives in English literature programs and no time at all around mother sows.

Anybody else wondering if testosterone simply makes the taste of hot sauce more appealing? This would lead one to conclude handling guns actually makes men more nurturing caretakers, who want to pass along flavor goodness to their fellow students. :) What a ridiculous study.

I couldn't possibly have put it any better than that anonymous poster who posted that sentence.

More pop-psychological brilliance, delivered up with side orders of anti-male, anti-gun propaganda.............

Dr. Wes might be a bit confused that more and more women are choosing to arm themselves.

Perhaps he can find some place to theorize why such women are apparently needing their "testosterone" fixes.

If Dr. Wes and his wife are ever victims of home invasion, and he is tied up and forced to watch as his wife is raped, his belongings stolen, with his life and his wife's life threatened, then he will likely experience the need to go out and buy a gun in order to sit and drink Tabasco sauce himself, assuming that he survives the ordeal.

1) Is anyone at all surprised that putting a gun in a man's hand inspires him to aggression? Guns are about the most potent symbols of power (and violence) that we have. People like guns because of their associations with power. Power is by definition an ability to control others, and it is hard for the person being controlled (or those observing them) to see themselves as anything but being the victims of aggression. This isn't anti-male or anti-gun, it is trivially obvious.

You have Dr Wes confused with the study. If you click through and read Dr. Wes's post, you will see he is making fun of the study and calls it "male bashing: science with an agenda. It is the NYT's article and perhaps the psychologists who conducted the study who you want to address. I am sorry if my post did not make this clear.

Why wasn't the study also done on women?...they also have testosterone, though at lower levels. Could possibly it be sexism on the part of the researchers to assume that "women" and "guns" are not two things that go together?

3) Would anyone be surprised if you showed a group of men a pornographic movie, the majority would get an erection? Is this any different?

And a fourth:

4) If you feed dogs and at the same time ring a bell, I wonder if after a while you'd find that they salivate when the bell is rung even if there's no food? Gosh, that'd be an interesting experiment, I wonder if anyone's thought of it before...

Also, from the NYT article: "the levels had spiked"...is "spiked" now a scientific term? What's wrong with putting in some numbers? Does the NYT think that would be too difficult for their audience to understand?

Although they *did* us a number when it came to the hot sauce ratio...so I'm guessing the actual numbers of the testosterone weren't all that impressive.

Yet the aggression was not entirely psychological: the higher the peaks in testosterone, the more hot sauce the students dumped into the drink. And once they learned the real aims of the study, several were disappointed that their cocktails would not be served to a fellow student.

Unless I entirely misundertood my Psych 101, it's entirely psychological. The only reason a gun gets a reaction is that the person knows what it is, etc. Just like John Doe mentioned, it's Pavlov and the bell. Otherwise, one would react to it as if it were an unknown foreign object.

What testosterone laden male hasn't done the hot sauce trick or one of its relatives?

Goldberg's comments are excellent. Wolverine's don't like being teased? Never would have guessed.

One question I have... did any of these young men handle guns on a regular basis? After all - there are huge numbers of young men who never even see a gun while growing up, much less learn how to handle one. Wouldn't it be more exciting the first time you pick up a gun? As I recall, I thought it was very exciting the first time I went to the range to shoot a 22 rifle.

For a policeman who puts on a gun daily, cleans it, takes it to the range - I would think it would be so routine as to make no change in their "excitement levels". We won't even add guys like Marines and Infantry.

And I must say, being a woman I feel discriminated against! They only used MEN in the study. What's that all about? Women aren't good enough for them? Sheesh. I think I should sue. I want to know if MY testosterone levels go up when I handle a gun. Do I feel more manly? These things are important!

(okay for all those with no sense of humor - the preceding paragaph was sarcasm)

Jim: English Literature?? I have two degrees in the field and seriously doubt that's where the skewed sense behind this "study" came from. Granted, more and more PC professors, male and female, are choosing literature that they can use to promote their men=bad/women=good perspectives. But then there are the social science courses, and may I specifically mention the Women's Studies classes? That's where I "learned" that the majority of men are sexists, insensitive, of no help around the house or with the kids, etc., ad nauseum. Notice, please, the "" around the word.

"Jim: English Literature?? I have two degrees in the field and seriously doubt that's where the skewed sense behind this "study" came from."

You are right; if anyone makes a real study of almost any literature they should end up with a pretty good sense of how people function, and that would include a capacity for violence in almost every individual, regardless of gender. The Celtic literatures are full of howling women warriors and female archetypes. Chinese literature is full of women who wreak all kind of violence, and a lot of it is positive. All of it is entertaining. But a person can spend an entire career in a literature department with ideological blinkers on miss all that. What a waste. What a shame.

You are also probably right that it is unlikely that these researchers got their bias directly from literary studies - what are the chances they ever studied any literature of any kind? But I was referring to the gender theorists who crank out all this gender drivel.

Here's the study http://faculty.knox.edu/fmcandre/guns-testo-aggress.pdf - notice that there's no data set. I can't make out how many subjects were in each group and how they were assigned.

The hypothesisIn this study we examine whether the presence of a gun (vs. a control object)might act as a stimulus signaling competition and a threat to status; if so, it should causeincreases in males’ testosterone levels, which in turn should increase their aggressivebehavior....We hypothesized that males who interacted with the gunwould show both more of increase in testosterone levels and more aggression than would males who interacted with the children’s toy.

The Problems1. functional dissimilarity in task selection.2. ignores established research pointing to contributing affects.

Firstly, many of the articles discussing this study are misleading for the fact that they misrepresent the nature of the subjects' interactions with the gun v. game pieces. The male students weren't handling a gun in the way that these stories have implied. They were asked to provide instructions for disassembling and re-assembling a 'large handgun' - a replica of a gas-operated semi-automatic pistol known as the Desert Eagle. Alternatively they could provide similar instructions for a mousetrap game.

Handling a gun implies handling it for use, not handling it for disassembly. So claims that this study demonstrates that gun use provokes aggression are poorly founded. But then a lede such as - 'Disassembling Guns Provokes Aggression', is plainly silly.

Comparatively the disassembly and reassembly of a mousetrap game, versus a large handgun are not equivalent tasks either in their motor/visual a/o cognitive requirements. The Desert Eagle specifically is a very eccentric handgun design. It utilizes a gas operated action and rotating bolt, like certain automatic rifles. The gun actually requires a special tool for disassembly, so I'm not sure of how the subjects were able to break it down. Obviously the mousetrap game is designed to be constructed by toddlers. But it doesn't seem that these disparities were factored in the study - e.g. to weight T levels in light of stress and physical exertion relative to a comparative task.

Also, the following may provide some evidence for an increase in testosterone levels due to the application of fine motor skills and focussed vision.

Young Menhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1938135&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsumThe visuomotor learning for the left hand was found to be better in subjects with normal and high testosterone than those with low testosterone. It was concluded that testosterone would favor the visuomotor development especially of the left cerebral hemisphere, probably at puberty; the motor learning of this hemisphere does not seem to be associated with testosterone. Testosterone seems to be advantageous for the visuomotor performance as well as for the motor learning of the right cerebral hemisphere.

Young Womenhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1938128&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsumMotor learning linearly decreased with testosterone for the right hand, not for the left hand. These results seem to be in accord with the testosterone theory of cerebral lateralization (Geschwind & Behan, 1982).

Jim: Sadly, a person these days can spend an entire career span in just about any college or university department and never take the ideological "blinkers" (blinders?) off.

Never tho't about that, actually: Has the study of, say, inorganic chemistry become politicized? Consider that a rhetorical question. If anyone were to say, "Yes!" I'm afraid my despair would be too great to bear.

Although I am 100% against gun ownership in general and believe gun use should be limited to solely police officers and the like I definitely agree this study is quite silly and proves nothing.

I used to be a very left leaning individual but thanks to terrible and incredibly biased 'scientific' studies I'm realizing that no side is 'right' and both have their merits.

The conservatives here in canada seem to be striking the perfect balance now(save for the government censorship fiasco). I'm just worried about them gaining a majority in the government as they will turn to the right drastically. Sigh...If only the liberals weren't so incredibly corrupt and such promise breakers then I'd vote for them in a second.

Good post on Poulter's work--I had never heard of him but I imagine the last paragraph of the article you link to and your analysis is correct. His father won't talk to him since the book. I can't say as I blame him. I guess it's easier to blame dads for all of one's problems, they probably are conditioned not to fight back and they won't buy such a book anyway. Women and those who feel their father was absent, no good, a loser etc. can reinforce the notion that their life is not perfect because dad caused their problems. It's a win-win situation for the reader and author.

Speaking from personal experience, I also get a testosterone rush whenever I use tools - whether it is a hammer, a saw, or a really good piece of design software for making control progams for machinery.

As for English Majors being anti-male, my father is a reitred English teacher (NOT EDUCATOR) and actor. He still fishes, taught my brother, my sisters, and me to use a gun and to hunt, and went hunting until he was in his sixties. (Heart problems limited him after that.)

"Vicki said... Jim: Sadly, a person these days can spend an entire career span in just about any college or university department and never take the ideological "blinkers" (blinders?) "

Vicki, as you can tel by my weird brain stutter on "blinkers" (What pit in my brain did that come out of?) I wasn't paying that commnet my full attention when I wa swriting it - I was referring to literature departments, in the context of the poost I was replying to.

But this is an interesting question: "Never tho't about that, actually: Has the study of, say, inorganic chemistry become politicized?" - I was talking about ideological bias, not actual political bias, but it's still an interesting question. I think some disciplines tend towards specific worldviews and habits of thought - perahps that is inherent in the notion of "discipline". More than one person has noticed the higher than normal correlation of people in engineering and jihadi and other inerrancy-based religion and even political activity. The underlying link seems to be that engineers are not really scientists, looking at the world sceptically and through exerimentation, but designers who apply other people's research.

American English for the device that prevents racehorses from looking to their sides is "blinders".

Aussies and Brits use the term "blinkers" for the same device.

No doubt you heard or read those words in the correct context more than once, which contributed to your "stutter".

Now to your observation/question:

"But this is an interesting question: "Never tho't about that, actually: Has the study of, say, inorganic chemistry become politicized?" - I was talking about ideological bias, not actual political bias, but it's still an interesting question. I think some disciplines tend towards specific worldviews and habits of thought - perahps that is inherent in the notion of "discipline". More than one person has noticed the higher than normal correlation of people in engineering and jihadi and other inerrancy-based religion and even political activity.

Happily, the notions of "jihad" and engineering are driven by the larger numbers of men than women who are proficient in engineering. I'm not writing that women could not participate in "jihad", but since "jihads" are traditionally the realm of fundamentalist Islam, there's relatively little female leadership involved.

You might also draw a conclusion that boxer shorts are a key contributor to "jihad".

In fact, ideological preferences in fields of study are typically stronger among the soft sciences.

Engineers look at the world as a series of systems, and that includes the creation of NEW systems, not to mention the design and study of such systems.........

..... which pretty much shoots holes in your theory that "engineers are not really scientists, looking at the world sceptically and through exerimentation, but designers who apply other people's research.

"..... which pretty much shoots holes in your theory that "engineers are not really scientists, looking at the world sceptically and through exerimentation, but designers who apply other people's research.

I am oversimplifying of course. "

The creation of new systems is not the same as research, and it doesn't require don't do research and they tend not to be sceptical. They build from a tool-kit of principles that others - mathematicians, physicicsts, metallurgists - have developed. They work with a body of received wisdom, both facts and the conclusions others develop. Because this received wisdom is the product of solid research, it is pretty much infallibly correct. What kind of worldview do you expect to find in a person learning this as a finished product rather than through the process of developing on his own?

Engineers are to scientists what 8th grade English teachers are to grammarians and linguists; not more, not less and not the same.

"You might also draw a conclusion that boxer shorts are a key contributor to "jihad"." As well as procreative sex, obviously. I think you'll agre the connection I drew is a litle more relevant.

Jim, I believe that engineering as it is taught, and engineering as a profession are two different (albeit overlapping) fields of thought.

Certainly engineering as taught involves following "tool-kits of principles".

That behavior helps individuals to design and build damns and bridges that do not fail, since failed experimentation has some awfully high price tags.

The engineers that developed the vaccuum tube, the transistor, the integrated circuit, had no such price tags placed upon their failures.

Engineers solve problems, and to solve problems, they must first look into their tool-kit of principles to identify those problems and overcome them.

I was pointing out the "boxer shorts" implication to "jihad" to show that cause-and-effect reasoning with respect to a human condition (in this case jihad) and the fact that jihadists most active and outspoken members are typically male as related, but not necessary.

"I was pointing out the "boxer shorts" implication to "jihad" to show that cause-and-effect reasoning with respect to a human condition "

Nagarjuna showed about 1500 years ago that if you examine cause and effect logically rigorously enough, it falls apart, so we'll just let good enough be good enough on that.

My point was that engineers, even as a rpofession rather than as students, have little need or opportunity to question their basic operating principles, unlike other professions, such a sthe military let's say (I am thinking of the way the army about 75 years ago started a cultrual shift form war-as-glory to war-as-politically-necessary-slaughter, and ended up reading Sun Zi instead of Tennyson)

It's just that my experience with my engineer father and watching him grow out of his certainties has taught me a few thing about the species.